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the sensibility of a zen warrior

well … it goes deeper than a professional soldier, ya know, its more like the spartans or the klingons, a whole culture built strictly on warfare. they like the extreme athletes of battle, have so completely mastered their techniques and tools of war that battle and death are like the performance of an art. They total discipline and wild abandon at the same time.

so zen, its like total space and nothing. The no-mind no-thinks no-thoughts about no-things. Beyond time. No need or desire. An endless elemental energy in the back of yo brain and behind yo eyes and yo mind’s eye so you can’t see it, but its there, a silently vibrating dynamo, throbbin’ with the rhythm of the universe.

so a zen warrior like a soldier fightin’ a battle everyday within himself and within the world. Not that there is a clear dividing line between the two. Because of consumate skill the battle takes little or no time, instantly ending and all the participants come through in better shape than they went in.

who the battle with? The self and the self of our common mind, playin’ out all in the physical world. There are forces in the world … so many … economical, ideological, biological, society a complex interplay of a multitude of forces comin’ at us continuously, we each like a vector, a focal point – all these forces are selfish – dominated by all the various fragments of our “self”. The idea is to be nothing so that no force moves ya.

that is death. The ending of the self. ‘Course “you” , the whole body/mind, the living organism right here now in the world. So livin’ in the world – the real world that is deteriorating so rapidly – becomes an exercise in responsibility, response to the emergency we all facin’ together. We already participatin’ in it.

and that is the revolution. Whether planetary forces crush us or we take responsibiliy for our own creation …